


The House With The Ivy Door

by Kimi_Ichisaigosuki



Series: Cold Iron and Old Blood [4]
Category: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (Movies)
Genre: Gen, Injury, Parasites, but in the "aftermath of a serious magical parasitic infection" kind of way, not in a violent way, so be mindful if you're sqeamish, this gets graphic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-02
Updated: 2018-07-02
Packaged: 2019-06-01 02:40:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,353
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15133304
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kimi_Ichisaigosuki/pseuds/Kimi_Ichisaigosuki
Summary: A short interlude in which Percival does what he must to keep his city safe, no matter how much he dislikes it.





	The House With The Ivy Door

**Author's Note:**

> Graphic description of parasite-induced injury. There's no parasite I'm aware of that would do what's described here, but still. If you don't like parasitic worms, this probably isn't the best thing for you to read. Apologies to Funkzpiel, who had to endure the slightly drunken mini-rant about magical parasites that inspired this.
> 
> This takes place not long after "Glamorie" and is mostly just Percival doing his duty, even when it hurts him. Not much more to it.

Percival walked down the street, slowly adjusting to his new body and how it differed from what he was used to. Ever since he’d embraced his Sidhe blood and returned to New York, he’d noticed things that escaped his attention before in some of the worse parts of town. Entire vacant lots squeezed into narrow alleyways, holding burned out remnants of buildings, squat and sullen and watching him with seething shadows from empty windows and doorways of homes from the original colony. Victorian houses overgrown and listing dangerously into the street, old curses chasing themselves through the termite-ridden woodwork underneath peeling paint. Trees whose bark twisted into screaming faces, their limbs the grotesquely split and warped remains of arms and fingers. Street urchins with bodies younger than Percival’s sister had been upon her death, and with eyes older than his great grandmother’s, their shaking hands reaching out as they pled for coin in currencies that hadn’t been honored on American soil for over a century. His glamorie shifted uneasily at the edges, and he took a moment to ground himself and steady the tactile illusion.

He continued down the street by the riverside, ignoring the kelpie waiting to lure travelers to an awful drowning. The kelpie at least he had a name for, unlike some of the cursed citizens of the New York gutters.

And finally, he came to it. The house with the front door rotting on its hinges and the lock rusted open, held shut by the ivy growing up, around, and underneath the panel of the door.

Percival let out the breath he hadn't realized he was holding and stepped up to the ivy-shrouded door, pushing past the leaves and vines to rest his hand against the rotting wooden panel. Old wards buzzed with exhausted aggression beneath his palm, their power all but spent. It was the work of a breath to unravel the wards and finally, finally let them sleep.

The door was so rotten, the lock so rusted, that it swung open with the barest push, leaving the ivy suspended in midair, vines clinging to vines clinging to doorframe clinging to wall, creating a leafy portal into nothingness.

In the darkness, something rustled.

Percival frowned and cast wards of his own to keep No-Maj's and wizards alike from coming to investigate, coupled with a minor blurring charm to hide anything that might see the light of day. Secrecy taken care of, Percival stepped through the ivy and into the house.

He made his way through a collapsing living room, mentally reviewing the rumors that had caught his attention and brought him here in the first place. A monstrous thing, neither human nor creature but some horrible amalgamation of the two. He was expecting a faun, a satyr, a harpy, or even a minotaur.

What he found in the upstairs bedroom was so much worse.

The poor bastard was slumped against the far wall, immobilized by the worm weaving in and out of his flesh with no regard for where muscle ended and became bone, or where bone ended and became soft, rich organ meat. Percival frowned and looked closer as the person shifted weakly. Not man, woman. She was so wasted that it was difficult to tell under the ragged remains of her clothes, though there was a wand on the floor just out of her reach that marked her as a magic user.

The eye that was still intact followed his movements, the other socket twitching around the body of the worm that passed through it. Her hair had fallen out in clumps, only the barest wisps still clinging to her scalp like brittle straw. Enough flesh had been eaten away as the worm tore through her body that Percival could see gnawed bone in some places, half-chewed organs in others. The worm's head was buried in her liver, its body undulating slowly around her exposed heart, keeping it beating. Keeping her alive.

Percival's mouth twisted unhappily and he knelt in front of her, keeping a careful distance. Well out of her arm's reach, well out of the worm's lunging reach. He didn't know if changelings were vulnerable to magical parasites that targeted humans, and he didn't want to find out the hard way. "Can you hear and understand me?"

There was a long moment of non-reaction in which Percival hoped that the answer was no, that the worm had eaten enough of the brain to render what he was looking at an empty, if living shell, long bereft of a mind able to feel pain and madness. Then, to his dismay, she managed the barest nod and a pained breath around the segmented body perforating her throat just above her collarbone.

He let out a long breath through his nose as he collected himself. "You know there's no cure for this? That we can't heal the damage that's been done?" Because that was the awful cruelty of magical parasites: they ate magic as well as flesh, and without magic to help the body survive once the parasite's own magic was removed, the flesh simply gave up. Healing potions couldn't convince defeated flesh to regrow and knit itself back together without the soul present to push the body, and one of the first things these worms ate was the soul's connection to the body, holding the soul in place with their own magic as they ate and ate and ate.

Another nod, and a barely audible "kill me...please…"

Percival closed his eyes, opened them, and nodded, standing up and letting his wand slip onto his hand. "Are there any last rites you want? Anyone we should contact?"

"No... There's nothing. Nothing...and nobody..." Another shaky breath. "Just know my name... Susan. Susan Anderson." She closed her eye as Percival took another step back and aimed his wand at the worm.

"...I'm sorry, Susan."

She didn't respond.

Percival killed the worm.

Susan's chest stopped moving. Her lungs stopped filling. Her limbs twitched with the last struggling movements of the worm as its body denied its own death as viciously as it could, but the wellspring of Susan’s magic was long dry, and it had nothing to fall back on.

Percival sighed, contacted the coroner, waited with Susan. The coroner asked Percival if he knew her name.

"Susan Anderson. That's all she told me."

“Right. Well, that’s probably for the better. The body will have to be destroyed where it is.”

Percival looked up sharply, feeling his glamorie ripple at his sudden, visceral reaction to the thought of Susan’s remains not being returned to any family they might be able to track down. “What do you mean?”

“Look at what’s left of the skin, Graves. Look at the way it’s moving.” The coroner indicated a subtle writhing, heaving motion between the skin and muscle where skin was still intact. It made Percival feel nauseated in a way that took him by the gut and the eyes and refused to let go. “That worm was gravid, and the larvae will be looking for new hosts soon. We can’t risk moving the body.”

It made him sick, but Percival agreed. He summoned Susan’s wand for identification via the archives, tucking it away in his coat for safekeeping. He helped the coroner’s assistant record the pertinent details, cast powerful charms to wipe the old, ivy-wreathed house from any and all maps, then set the whole thing ablaze. The portal into darkness in the ivy-shrouded doorway remained unilluminated until finally the roof caved in, and only then did the leaves begin to crisp, backlit by awful fire, before the doorframe finally collapsed with the rest of the house. Everything burned until there was nothing left but soft ash that would blow away in the wind. Percival made sure of it.

Once the danger of spreading fire was done, and the coroner and his assistant gone to wrap up their part in recording Susan’s death, Percival went home, poured himself a glass of the strongest whiskey he had, and set to work forgetting the memories of that night, however temporarily that might be.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! Leave a kudos and/or comment if you enjoyed!


End file.
